I have been away over the weekend, at one of Martin Crawford’s forest gardening courses in Devon. It was fascinating, I have photos and I will blog it in due course. Project: Nosh will also resume now that I’m back, but I am really tired and need a couple of days to recover!
I’m not the only one out in my garden looking for food. Nathaniel the hedgehog is still spending some of his (possibly her!) nights in the old dog kennel, and I put hedgehog food out in a dish with a bowl of clean water to go with it.
The birds are eating their way through a winter surplus of fat balls – it seems to keep the sparrows happy now that they’re nesting, and the pigeons have just worked out they can stand on the platform of the bird table and reach the feeder, so they’re having their share.
A few week’s ago I was sent a bird feeder and bird seed to review from Nature’s Feast. As I was well endowed with fat balls, I took it to mum and dad’s Malvern garden. They have a bird table of their own, and a good population of birds that visit.
The new feeder is a reasonably sturdy plastic design, divided into three vertical compartments with 2 perches in each one (it’s called a ‘tornado twist’). Filling the compartments with different seeds means you might attract different birds, but is a little tricky direct from the bags (it would have been easier if we’d fetched a funnel).
Mum had a think and picked a spot in which to hang the new bird feeder – on the corner of the summer house.
Nature’s Feast have a large range of bird seed on offer, and included in the box they sent me was a press release about their No Gro, non-germinating seed mix. I was initially concerned that there was no information on how this is made, but Nature’s Feast have informed that the seeds are physically damaged so that they are non viable – there’s no nasties lurking in there, and they’re still safe and nutritious for the birdies to eat.
Last time I visited Malvern, two blue tits had found the feeder and were making use of it (I didn’t have my zoom lens, so couldn’t take a good photo). The other birds are still focused on the original bird table. Mum thinks we need to move it to a more obvious position; with fat ball supplies now running low here I think I may bring it back to Abingdon for the sparrows. it’s nice to have them flying round the garden when potential house buyers visit!